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• Foster care. The Department of Social Services recently revealed that two-thirds of all youngsters in its statewide system are being treated by the Department of Mental Health (DMH). Most of them are simply cast aside and left to their own devices when they "age out" of state oversight, usually at age 18, says a 2002 report for DMH, and thus simultaneously lose access to both therapeutic care and any adult presence in their lives. "The Department of Mental Health systematically puts these dangerous people out in the community," says the BPD outreach officer. The Casey Foundation found that nearly half of these teens are arrested within two to four years of leaving foster care.

• Juvenile-justice system. The same outreach officer calls the prison experience "as heinous as possible" for youths. In 2003, the Department of Youth Services saw a six percent increase in pretrial-detention admissions statewide, including a five percent jump in the Boston metro area, from 1469 to 1544. The pace for 2004 was just behind last year’s through May, the last month for which figures are available. The number of juveniles committed to DYS is currently 59 percent higher than it was 10 years ago. The Casey report says that "no experience may be more predictive of future adult difficulty than having been confined in a secure juvenile facility," and yet less than one-third of detainees end up there for violent offenses. While they are confined, "they are much more likely to be tutored in crime than they are in math, and their mentors are much more likely to be offenders than caring adults."

• Teen parenting. After controlling for other factors, teen parenthood reduces academic attainment by almost three years, studies show. This means lower income, and often reduced access to health care and other social resources. Not all teen mothers and fathers are bad parents, but they are much more likely to fall into the downward spiral of poverty. They and their children fall into riskier behavior. "I see guys drinking in the middle of the day. I see prostitution at 7 a.m. Those are all parents," says David Hinton, director of the Vine Street Community Center, on Dudley Street. "This is a beautiful center, and home isn’t like that for many of the kids. They come here, and they pretty much don’t want to leave. We have to make them go home."

• High-school dropouts. Officially, the annual dropout rate in Boston’s public schools is now eight percent, slightly higher than it was before the MCAS graduation requirement kicked in with the class of 2003. Many argue that the actual number is much higher. (The state Department of Education switched to a new data-collection system two years ago; its results are so clearly out of whack that the state is one of only three that fail to report the dropout rate to the federal government. The official data show, for example, that both Lowell and Revere High Schools had zero dropouts last year.)

Some, like Josh Dohan, director of Boston’s Youth Advocacy Project, suspect that it’s no coincidence that violence increased when the first kids to face the MCAS requirement reached their late teens. When early testing showed that up to two-thirds of Boston’s public-school students were failing MCAS, the state and city put in place a number of obstacles to advancement, including tougher requirements for grade promotion, and looser rules for expulsions and suspensions. Retentions and expulsions have leapt to new highs — the best predictors of dropping out, say educational researchers like Anne Wheelock, of the Progress Through the Education Pipeline project at Boston College. Now the city has announced plans to give up, in effect, on a four-year high-school path for many students, creating an "at your own speed" option. And last fall the Boston Public Schools sent letters to principals encouraging them to outplace "overage" students by moving them into adult-education programs; these transfers do not count as dropouts, although nobody tracks whether they ever graduate.

"We chased them out of the system," says Frank Haydu, former acting commissioner of the state’s Department of Education. "You can choose to believe what you’re hearing from inner-city principals, or what you’re hearing from the Department of Education." Hinton concurs. "By eighth, ninth, 10th grade, a lot of them are dropping out," he says. "I don’t think the Boston Public Schools are equipped to deal with MCAS right now."

"[Failing students] are experiencing a lot of negative personal development, instead of building self-esteem, self-confidence, a positive connection with teachers and peers," says Dohan. "All of this is exacerbated by MCAS. The rational response would be to pour resources into elementary school. What we see is that the schools try not to let kids reach 10th grade."

THOSE WHO HAVE dropped out are finding it harder than ever to get work. That’s so for a number of reasons, starting with the disappearance of jobs. Unemployment rates in the Boston metropolitan area doubled, from 2.9 to 5.8 percent, from 2000 to 2002. Jobs normally appropriate for young adults have vanished the most quickly. An astonishing 15 percent of Boston’s manufacturing jobs disappeared in a single year: from 2001 to 2002, nearly 4000 jobs were lost, according to "The Boston Economy — 2003," a publication of the Boston Redevelopment Authority. During the same year, approximately 5500 retail jobs, 5500 government jobs, and 3000 nonprofessional service-sector jobs also dried up.

That has dramatically increased competition for even the most menial and low-paying jobs. "When Target opened" at the South Bay Center, "that was a 16-, 17-year-old’s job," says Patricia Knight, director of youth-and-technology programs at the Codman Square Technology Center. "Now you’ve got a 40-year-old doing it."

Placing inner-city kids at a further competitive disadvantage, some say, is the fact that a vast and growing number of jobs have become unavailable to those with a criminal history. That trend accelerated in 1997, when the state’s Executive Office of Health and Human Services began mandating criminal-record checks. Twelve of the city’s 36 largest employers are medical providers, who are among the strictest about hiring ex-cons.

Meanwhile, a Northeastern University study, published in May, calls this the worst market for summer jobs since the 1940s. Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD) once provided as many as 10,000 summer jobs; now it has no public funding, and has managed to raise enough money to employ only 850 this year, out of the 14,000 who applied.